Robert Cailliau
(1947-present)

Aged 77

Robert Cailliau (French pronunciation: ​[ʁɔbɛʁ kajo], born 26 January 1947) is a Belgian informatics engineer, computer scientist and author who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web (jointly winning the ACM ACM Software System Award) from before it got its name. He designed the historical logo of the WWW, organized the first International World Wide Web Conference at CERN in 1994 and helped transfer Web development from CERN to the global Web consortium in 1995. Together with Dr. James Gillies, Cailliau wrote How the Web Was Born, the first book-length account of the origins of the World Wide Web.

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Commemorated on 1 plaque

Where The Web was born. In the offices of this corridor, all the fundamental technologies of the World Wide Web were developed. Started in 1990 from a proposal made by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, the effort was first divided between an office in building 31 of the Computing and Networking Division (CN) and one in building 2 of the Electronics and Computing for Physics Division (ECP). In 1991 the team came together in these offices, then belonging to ECP. It was composed of two CERN staff members, Tim Berners-Lee (GB) and Robert Cailliau (BE), aided by a number of Fellows, Technical Students, a Coopérant and Summer Students. At the end of 1994 Tim Berners-Lee left CERN to direct the WWW consortium (W3C), a world-wide organization devoted to leading the Web to its full potential. The W3C was founded with the help of CERN, the European Commission, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In 1995 Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau received the ACM Software System Award for the World Wide Web. In 2004, Tim Berners-Lee was awarded the first Millenium Technology Prize by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation. The CERN Library June 2004

European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN CH-1211, Geneva, Switzerland where they developed the fundamental technologies of the World Wide Web